Richard Montgomery High School is unbelievably pleased to announce Self Written Academic Games For Every Studious Team. This tournament will be held on February 25, 2012 at our school in fabulous Rockville, Maryland.

Registration will begin at 8:15, with the opening meeting at about 9:00 AM. The fee structure is as follows:Base fee: $70Buzzer discount: -$5Reader discount: -$10Each additional team from a school: -$5Minimum fee per team: $40

For now, no field cap is specified, so register at will!Checks should be made out to "Richard Montgomery High School" with "It's Academic" in the memo line.

I really hope that this isn't the announcement that you sent out in emails to local clubs, because many coaches, especially ones that are less familiar with pyramidal QB or tournaments such as these, are going to have a very hard time taking you seriously when they read this. I'd suggest changing this and writing it in a much more serious and professional manner if you wish to attract new teams.

Smuttynose Island wrote:I really hope that this isn't the announcement that you sent out in emails to local clubs, because many coaches, especially ones that are less familiar with pyramidal QB or tournaments such as these, are going to have a very hard time taking you seriously when they read this. I'd suggest changing this and writing it in a much more serious and professional manner if you wish to attract new teams.

This, this, a thousand times this. If people are wondering why quizbowl in Maryland seems to be growing smaller and smaller, announcements like these for tournaments named "SWAGFEST" don't help matters.

It has been intended all along to approach never before seen teams differently than this. I don't think very many forum posts at all here would be suitable for someone who has never been to a quizbowl tournament before or that many teams have attended their first tournament as a direct consequence solely from reading the forums. For example, in the army, the image of a drill sergeant towering over you, barking harsh commands is the reality once you are there. Recruiting centers do not focus on that aspect, and emphasize the benefits.

EDIT: I appreciate the concern and any further advice in expanding the circuit is welcome

Seeing the Centennial Attack tournament in Georgia, we are considering bracketing teams by national-caliber and regular varsity to promote more games between teams of like ability. Most likely, teams will be able to choose which bracket to participate in. Thoughts on this?

That works when you have a pretty good sized field. Considering the last tournament we attended at RM had a total of 10 teams playing (including a solo player and a house team), it's probably more important to just get more teams to come to this tournament than worry about giving great teams more competitive games.

And, yes, we're interested in coming. I don't know how my kids would feel about this field splitting thing.

But, because of the comments in this thread please fix this set before we attend this tournament using these questions in 4 weeks. If i do not hear about significant edits, improvements, and alterations - and hear them from objective observers somehow - there's a chance we will decide not to attend.

Adam Kalinich and various other players at the NIU mirror of this drew up a fairly comprehensive list of errors, Wikiplagiarism, and other problems with this set; these have for the most part been worked through (80% of the document has been resolved, at last glance). We were planning to send the set for verification sometime next week.

For now, we will cap the field at 18 teams (those which have registered via email). For any teams that would be interested in coming but have not yet registered, we will start a waitlist. If we get 6 teams on the waitlist and extra moderators, we may be able to accomodate 24 teams.

The tournament was definitely well-run and there was some good competition. However, the set had too many questions that were "One person from this country" or "One person of this name" or "One painting with this object". I dont know if that's just me, but i really dont like that type of question.

Oakland Mills '14 - The Most Unpredictable Team in Quiz Bowl Yale '18 - Majoring in X Studies"Field Commander" Isaac KD, "The Savior of the Forest"

Paul from OM wrote:Oakland Mills finished 6th with a record of 5-4, losing the fifth place game to Caesar Rodney. This was a great tournament!

GDS A finished first, beating St. Anselm's on the last tossup of a one-game final.

Blair finished third, beating Whitman A on the last tossup of the third-place game.

BCC and Gonzaga A were playing for 7th to fill out the top bracket - I don't know the results of that game.

Churchill beat Monticello Concerto A to win 9th, not sure who won the 11th place game but it involved GDS B and Whitman B if my memory serves me; no placement games were played for places below that as teams left early.

C.R.E.A.M. wrote:The tournament was definitely well-run and there was some good competition. However, the set had too many questions that were [types of common links]. I dont know if that's just me, but i really dont like that type of question.

When I played the set earlier this month, I thought it had a pretty normal number of common link questions. You may not like the way common links feel, but there is a good reason why we have them. Common link questions are a really nice practice because they give writers the ability to test knowledge that they would otherwise be unable to in a set of a certain difficulty. For example, if a writer wanted to ask about Juan Rulfo (random example) in a high school set, they would be much better off writing a tossup on "Mexico" and using his work for very early clue(s) and transitioning into easier Paz and Fuentes clues. This means that they would produce a tossup that incorporates some harder, interesting material without going way overboard in difficulty. Sometimes, common link questions can be poorly executed and frustrating, but for the most part they can make quizbowl more interesting.

Obviously, I'm interested in hearing any and all positive and/or negative feedback about this set. I dunno if there will be anymore mirrors besides Charlie Dees's singles event, but maybe we should get a discussion thread started or something?

Abid Haseeb Auburn High School '12Brown University '16Writer, HSAPQWriter, NAQT

This set was all sorts of great, if but a tiny bit hard at times. There were a few bonuses that below average teams were not getting 10s on, and there certainly were some... hm, interesting... ideas for tossups. A few were just too hard. Again, i stand by my general sentiment that asking about works by not-incredibly-easy authors is too hard for the average team in a lot of cases.

But, in general, the questions were written excellently and the second best housewritten set we've heard this year, behind GSAC. I definitely did like it quite a bit. Kudos to the Auburn kids and anyone else who helped on this set. I really enjoyed reading it a lot.

As for the tournament itself, it's a shame we only got 9 games with so many teams here, but that's just the way the brackets ended up i guess. Some of the lower bracket games took a very long time though, so perhaps this was the best route. My girls played really well and this was probably their best tournament of the year. The four teams above us are so clearly better, but we believe we really were better than all the ones below us too. Kind of nice to end up exactly in the place that we hoped for. We had a great time, and i really enjoyed moderating.

List of villages in West Virginia wrote:I keep posting in this thread, but this is probably the last time.

My girls were quick to point out something before we left on Saturday: there were a total of 4 females on any teams in all of the playoffs, and all 4 of them were all from CR.

Kind of cool and kind of depressing at the same time. Perhaps someday we should have a conversation about why quizbowl is not nearly as appealing to the fairer sex?

There have been several of these since I started reading these forums in 2008. They tend to lead to annoying and false generalizations about women and generally end poorly. Note: I'm not saying from a moderator's prospective that you shouldn't have such a conversation, but I figure it's worth noting that such threads tend to be fiascos and you may wish to tread carefully.

List of villages in West Virginia wrote:Was this tournament a PACE-NSC qualifier?

We'd delayed ruling on this one because of concerns about the question set. Sorry; I'd forgotten about that until you asked. I just emailed Mike Bentley and should be able to get back to you all on this later tonight.

Was very happy we could make this tournament and furthermore that we didn't do horribly at it. For our first QB tournament of the whole school year, I don't think 7th is too bad. Hopefully I'll be able to get all of our regulars on the A-team next time and maybe have a B-team as well.

List of villages in West Virginia wrote:Was this tournament a PACE-NSC qualifier?

We'd delayed ruling on this one because of concerns about the question set. Sorry; I'd forgotten about that until you asked. I just emailed Mike Bentley and should be able to get back to you all on this later tonight.

List of villages in West Virginia wrote:Was this tournament a PACE-NSC qualifier?

We'd delayed ruling on this one because of concerns about the question set. Sorry; I'd forgotten about that until you asked. I just emailed Mike Bentley and should be able to get back to you all on this later tonight.

So... any news?

This tournament is platinum-certified. Sorry, Chrz, time zones are mean.